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Matt Bartle, (R) Missouri state senator from Lee's Summit, has these words to offer in the Kansas City Star:
In Missouri, the graduation rate is around 85 percent. This means 15 percent of students do not finish high school on average each year.
Obviously, Bartle majored in mathematics in college.
I kid. Seriously, though, Bartle wrote his four point plan for turning Missouri schools into the model for nationwide change:
The first two changes involve our teachers. First, we must eliminate the bottom 15 percent based on poor performance and replace them with people who will get the job done. Such a move will have to be coupled with a second proposal—exchanging tenure for a merit-pay system that rewards excellent teachers with dramatically increased salaries. I’ll discuss both of these ideas in further detail next week.
The third and fourth adjustments involve the way we teach our kids. We must consider changing to a year-round school schedule with at least two different start times. Our traditional, nine months on, three months off school year—which is based on the agrarian calendar—undermines learning.
What Bartle is arguing is that summer pool time means lost algebra lessons. It means that when you spend three months playing baseball and camping with dad and the cub scouts you forget what the plot of My Antonia was.
The Abstracted Mother taught elementary school for many, many years and let me tell you, Bartle is right. TAM often lamented that the first few weeks of school are spent relearning everything that is forgotten over the summer.
However, I got lucky on my drive home from work and caught the local radio show interviewing Bartle. He claimed that teachers can be easily "tested" to determine if they were in the bottom 15%. "Tons of methods exist" he argued, and said that teachers should be tested for competence "on whatever subjects they teach." This all is beginning to seem a little grandiose to me. He suggested that teachers give up the tenure system (you know, the one put in place because the teacher drop out rate is very high and incentives were needed to keep teachers in the profession long enough for them to be good at their jobs) and instead a merit based system should be put in place.
The major problem I have with this scenario is that although it might weed out certain individuals who were completely unqualified to teach, it instead places public schools into the "professor paradox." Anyone who has attended college knows that the drowsy PhD's that are required to teach classes alongside their research are not necessarily good teachers, nor interested in teaching. However, they are brilliant geniuses who might be curing cancer or discovering new exoplanets. But part of their salary at the university comes from their teaching of courses. The same could quickly happen in Missouri under Bartles plan. If merit-based pay (and teacher survival) were based on the command an individual had over the curriculum, and not on their teaching effectiveness, students could find themselves being taught extremely poorly by extremely smart individuals.
Going back to the summer vacation issue, Bartle made it clear that he didn't think Missourians needed longer class days or more class days. He just thought by spacing them out and not having a massive summer break, students would have higher retention. However, Bartle apparently doesn't read the same paper to which he wrote, because also in the pages of the Kansas City Star is this report from the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, arguing that school years should be extended to 11 months in length, 6 days a week.
When exactly, Mr. Duncan, are kids supposed to be kids? Perhaps Bartle is right, school years should be adjusted and dispersed to increase knowledge retention while still giving kids the free time they need to grow and play and open their minds, but extending the school year from 180 to 313 days represents a massive overhaul of American society and a massive fiscal nightmare for state governments, who currently carry the burden of most of the countries' education costs.
Consider this: during the off times, schools run on less lighting, less air conditioning/heating and a barebones janitorial staff. Summer months off represent a massive savings for schools in warm parts of the country, who don't have to keep classrooms as cool. By dispersing the students' schedule, as Bartle suggests, this would increase, but possibly could be offset by longer breaks in winter (less heating cost). Teachers in most states are paid for a full year of teaching, based on the amount of days they are in work (inservice + student days). The time off is pro-rated and given to them either as a lump sum or in regular payments, depending on the teacher's preference and the state's plan. You better believe that if you increased the teacher's required number of work days by 30%, the teachers would expect at least that much of a salary increase.
Many students in the public school system receive free breakfast and reduced/free lunch as part of a widespread system to make sure underpriveledged students get proper nutrition. Obviously on days the students aren't in school, they don't get that food. Increase the number of school days by 133, as Duncan suggest, and you almost double the cost to the taxpayer for these reduced lunch programs.
I don't really think that Duncan has thought this through; perhaps he just wanted to sound bold and decisive, like he's "doing something, dammit!" And increasing the number of school days doesn't really translate all that well to better performance, if you look at international data, or read the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Redistribution of school days, as Bartle suggests, does markedly improve student test scores and the increased costs from the redistribution is minor.
On a side note: Senator Matt Bartle was home schooled. Arne Duncan went to private school. Neither man has been a teacher for a single day.
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